The same bird. Again. Was it that one yesterday or the day before? He thinks so. Strange. They never used to do that, back when he was young, when the world was more solid and certain. He's fairly sure of that.

Was it yesterday or this morning? Hard to say. He could ask, but they'll likely be angry again. They get angry a lot, these days. He doesn't quite understand why. Only questions. He likes to talk to them, likes to know, though he can't always remember their names, why they're here.

Shimmering and songs, tinsel and ornaments. He doesn't remember her putting the tree up, but he's sure that he might have helped, at some point, that she might have sighed and sent him away to sit down with a cup of tea or brandy. Why? Why isn't he at home, with the TV and fire and garden? Where's the dog? He used to know her name, used to remember her so fondly...now, it's all ghosts, all mist.

He wishes he could go the same way.

*

A boy. Old Winter, old Christmas, in that freezing farmhouse, the stone walls, no central heating, no boiler. Only the open fire, the stove, boiling kettles to fill the tin bath. Spiders the size of his hand. Massive, black spiders, skittering between the stones. Not even knowing about the war, save in the vaguest sense: something that Mom and Dad sometimes talk about, something that sometimes comes on the radio.

It might as well be happening in a foreign country.

Outside, the ground is frozen hard, the surrounding fields buried in snow so deep, he can't wade through it.

No playing outside; not this winter. Too cold, enough to freeze the blood in his veins, enough to turn his eyes to ice. He stays upstairs, with his brothers and sisters, huddling under the same blankets, their breath misting as they whisper stories and secrets to one another.

Lies, he'll later learn; all lies, but ones he loves, even now.

The same bird. He's sure of it; outside the window, staring in at him with its dark, dark eyes, somehow clearer, more real than everything else. It sees him here, he knows it, and it sees him there; little boy and old, old man, not yet formed, not yet sculpted, going to sludge in his own head, on his own bones.

The boy is merely fascinated, wanting to crawl out of bed and open the window, invite the thing in and feed it scraps of ginger loaf. The old man is afraid. Afraid of what it means, what it brings. Of remembering and drowning in his own tears.

It's gone from the farmhouse window, from his childhood, with a croak and a flap of its wings, the boy all but forgetting it in the next instant, intent on some other game, some other story.

*

It's cold here, too. So cold. Coughing through the afternoon while they laugh and drink and eat below. Doorbells, frightening voices: ghosts come to say hello. He used to know them, but today, they are no one: misty, smoky things with uncertain, swimming faces, who use words and names he doesn't know any more.

It's so tiring. He tries...tries to hold on, to follow them, but it's like trying to grip a live fish with his bare hands. He can't go down, can't even bring himself to wake, yet. Not entirely.

A few more moments in this cold room, with its bare floorboards, its immense window, the trees and empty sky staring in at him.

She used to be here, the one whose name he can't remember, whose face has begun to dissolve behind his eyes, no matter how eagerly he tries to maintain it. He remebers her...oh, he remembers her! Twenty five, when they first met, how pretty she was, how funny, how much his.

And later: years and years, endless roast dinners and arguments and bills and dogs and cats. Motorcycle rides and foreign holidays: Austria, once. South Africa, three times.

And later, with wires and tubes and beeping machines, with tears and questions and pain.

The bird comes again, today, waiting for him. It has never been far away; he remembers, now: how consistent it has been, there almost every day, in the branches of trees, perched on rooves or windowsills, grubbing worms from gardens or fields.

Always there, eating his eyes and his thoughts, waiting for him to be almost empty, so that it might tear him open, carry what's left away.

Unknown to him here, at the end; alien, no matter how much he has loved them, how much he has tried to make them laugh or safe or contented.

They don't know him and he doesn't know them. Their world is one of ghosts, and he...he can't bear to live there any more.

The window sticks, obliging him to lean against it. It gives all at once, the bird not taking fright, not leaping into the air, taking his one chance of escape with it.

Instead, it cocks its head, regarding him with its dark, inquiring eyes, asking him if he remembers, if he knows what was promised, when it came to him as a boy.

Cold air, chilling his flesh, reaching cold talons inside. He feels them around his heart, gently slowing it, freezing the blood in its chambers and channels.

Do you remember?

Yes.

An old pact, older than humanity, older than ghosts, older than snow and souls. The bird flutters its wings, coming to him now that he no longer stands, now that he sloughs off the born burden of yesterday.

This twisting barb of deju vu, of having walked here many times before. A nightmare of the cradle, that I resisted with every infantile breath, that I woke from screaming in the dark. No one and nothing to console, to quiet me with nonsense and lullabies.

Maybe why I went wandering in the first place, why I fell. Losing myself, cold, feverish, starving. Hungry eyes through the snow, between the trees. Black, sweating hulks, eyes like sick stars, teeth like black thorns.

All I remember, before waking there, in the quiet darkness, beside the lake, in the flowers that should never have bloomed so far beneath the Earth.

Elation. I remember that; to be alive, to be lost at last, with no way back home, to its emptiness and unwanting, to its dead eyes and cruel tomorrows.

Hunger. Hunger that stabbed me almost as sincerely as the cold of the mountainside, that twisted like frozen fingers in my belly, threatening to pull me inside out.

I remember...faces. Faces in the shadows, faces in the water, skittering across the stone. Faces that stared at me with curious, frightened, mistrusting eyes. Faces that formed from the mist, straying close to me before others dragged them back, dispersing them.

Forms that fled, melting to meaningless nothing when I spoke, when I tried to approach them, leaving behind only whispers and dreaming suggestion.

Except a smiling few. All lost, now. Nameless dust. I think he may have been one of the first, before today, before we met for the first time in this life. And the last. Not afraid of me, not even after everything I've done, the emptiness behind, the unravelling I've inspired. The seams of this subterannean world slit open, gaping at my back, bleeding chaos and reality. The dream's children burned, slaughtered, scattered with little more than words, glances, gestures.

Times when I might have reformed it, times when I might have allowed it to recoalesce, when I would have been happy to fall again and again, to wake to stories I already know.

Not any more. I'm tired. So tired of it, of remembering. A time when I might have prevented that, when I knew how. Now, all I have is memory, as confused and uncertain as it is. All I have are lost and abandoned lives.

There are those in which I live, in which I learn from them: the arts that have sustained them here, that allow them to be. In which I show them the way, break open the mountain, re-write them so they might walk in sunlight and rain and stars without being scattered, without fading to dust. Stories in which I lead them out, amongst my former kin, in which I become their ambassador in the waking world.

Such strange, strange stories. Tales that irrevocably alter humanity, history, all that is, that force those I fled from to re-evaluate their own conditions, their place in being. Stories that expose them for what they are: unable to see, unwilling to change. Brutes and bigots and abusers, animals I have no choice or compunction in slaughtering, allowing my adoptive kin, my truer tribe, to take their place.

All ultimately failing, no matter how long the legacy, how far into time and possibility they thread. All returning me to this essential moment, a lost and lonely child, frost-bitten and bitter in the snow. Falling, not even seeing the hole in the ground, the statues protruding from beneath the snow, between the trees.

Not allowing it, this time. Not allowing the child to take me, to subsume me. Fighting, when my time finally comes, activating arts and devices I concocted for that very purpose, that flared at my final breaths, my last heartbeats.

Agony. I remember that; the lunatic searing as I became a walking contradiction, the child whose skull and skin I infest crying out soundlessly, tumbling in the snow, spattering it red.

How he cries, how he laughs, as he struggles to rise, as the hated, smothering world around him wavers, fraying apart.

The wolves coming, then. Wolves no longer, but cruel boys and girls, their dark pelts shed in favour of snow-pale skin, their animal snarls giving way to wicked leers.

He knows them. I knew them. Once. The one that leads them...a tall, muscular girl, her hair pulled so taught against her head, it stretches her features back across her skull, making her eyes narrow and feline, her grin unnatural.

A gnarled bough in her gnarled hands, the violence in both plain.

The others...pathetic whelps, baying and snapping, shimmering between states of beasts and children.

"Where are you running to, Taylor? Where do you think you can go?"

The girl, Simone, having said the same a thousand times in waking memory, in a thousand different ways. No response I can give that doesn't end in violence, that doesn't result in blood. Times when I've laughed at her, when I've fled, when I've lunged at her with sharpened stones or boughs of my own. Times when I've called her a slope-browed troglodyte, a thick-as-pig-shit whore. Nothing I can say or do that doesn't bring pain.

Until today, when I am not me, and the boy, Taylor, isn't himself. When we are both and more, when we still mourn in the ashes of the one we've forgotten, who he has yet to meet, but knows, through me, my memories, the days that will never come.

Today, he lets her approach, shivering in the snow, as the gale howls, as the sky darkens, the last, pale pink rays of day seeping down through the clouds.

"Dad's gonna beat you senseless, you know that? You'll be lucky if you can walk anywhere ever again."

I laugh in her face. She stops, the cruelty in her eyes giving way to something far darker.

"No he won't, you brainless cunt. He won't ever touch me again."

For a moment, the snow seems to pause in its descent, the wind slows, the boughs freeze. Her followers yip and yammer at one another, almost rabid at the imminence of violence.

Until she howls, a sound to shame any wolf's worship of the Red Mother in the sky. She's on me before I can breathe, before I can think, black stars bursting across the world as I hurtle back, as it melts around me. I taste snow and dirt and blood, thoughts shattering, feverish fingers trailing down the side of my face.

Still laughing, as I struggle up, as she comes for me again, as the bough catchs me beneath the chin, cracking my jaw, my teeth crunching together, carried another several paces back down the path I carved through the snow.

Heaving, steaming, hurling the bough aside as she shifts and swells, the wolf taking her place once more.

"You're never going home. I'll tell them I found you already dead, ripped open, eaten alive."

Sputtering laughter at that, spraying the snow with blood.

She comes, loping towards me, muscular and scarred, lips peeling back from throat-puncturing teeth. What will she start with, I wonder? My eyes? My entrails? My cold-shrivelled excuse for manhood?

The others hold back, content to watch, certain that, were they to interfere, they'll be the ones bleeding out, the ones opened up and gnawed on.

"You...you won't tell them...anything."

The wolf yelping, becoming smoke again, the girl beneath staggering, clutching at her throat as though invisible hands clench it.

They still don't come, even then. Too afraid, of her, of me, as I stagger to my feet, as I stumble to her, smiling through my mask of blood.

"I...know so many ways to hurt you, Simone. So many ways to make you scream."

She doesn't, though she knows, though she sees. Not the same creature she expected to find, that she has a thousand times and more in the past, in different whens and wheres. When the rules of reality still applied.

What does she think I am, now? As I hold her fast, as I hoist her up, with little more than looks and gestures. Some sort of goblin-thing, a changeling of the woods? Ha! Not so wrong. Not any more.

The bravest, the most loyal or mind-rotted of her followers, skulk from their places in the shadows, laughing anxiously, begging me to stop:

I used to know their names, once. Now? I don't know anything about them, any more than I do the ones below, the lost people who would have made me just like them, conditioned me with the same sickness and called it necessary, called it truth.

She struggles, her legs kicking, her jeans darkening at the crotch, her face turning purple.

"A game. That's all it is. Everything. A sick children's game."

I smile at them, the ones who haven't run yet, not knowing what they see; only that they squeal, gasp, skitter away. Not even a gesture, barely a breath, and they fall, clutching at themselves, the sounds in their throats those of beasts strangling on blood and splintered bone, of wolves choked by wasp's nests swallowed whole.

They growl as they stagger to their feet, barking feebly. I silence them with a look, a smile that spreads far beyond the bounds of my face.

They flee, wailing into the woods, to become their own monsters, beasts that will become the sources of fairy tales, in time. That the surrounding villages and townships will tell tales of, to their surviving siblings, warning them against the wolves that wail like children, when the moon is full, that weep and pray as they howl.

As for her...

I let her go, let her fall. She lands hard, bruising, breaking, her wails music, her pain more beautiful, more comforting, than anything the child I was ever knew in the life they shared.

She scrabbles away, spitting curses, streaming snot and tears. I follow, reaching for her, though not with my flesh and blood hands.

Nowehere she can go, nothing she can do, now. This hot, sweating, bleeding moment; the most perfect we've ever shared, in which the child she has tormented and abused his entire life bursts into black flame, sheds himself and becomes his own species of beast, far removed from the unseen creature that she's made of her own soul, that she's swollen and sickened on a diet of perpetual, unthinking cruelty, to the point whereby it has become rabid beyond control.

The shadows find her, swarming upon her, plucking her up like a wounded fly, stretching her limbs out as she quivers and denies, as she slurs every species of prayer and apoology.

Not enough. Not enough for him or me. My gift to him: payment for the days that will never come, but that he remembers, through me.

Letting him take her, letting his unseen talons rake her, tearing away clothes, lacerating the flesh beneath, steaming chunks falling from her, a rain of deep red, as she silently screams, as the crows and magpies in the boughs overhead take flight. As the surrounding snow flushes scarlet.

They hear. I make sure of it: the idiot, shivering, hateful things in the villages below, especially the ones that love her, that remained wilfully blind to the momster they made. I make sure they'll hear until their dying days, until, perhaps, they happen upon her again, following her pathetic, mewling cries in the woods, and murder her, for the crime of her own consumption.

A wet and shivering scrap of a thing, a cankerous beast, lame in one leg, blind in one eye, infested with silvery fleas. It drops from what remains like a mewling turd, a thing shat rather than born into being. What remains of Sister Simone rains around in strings and tatters, that it instantly begins gnawing on, momentarily forgotten to itself, in its agonies.

He would love to sit and watch her, to laugh as she gnaws at her own hide, as she yelps at sounds and shadows, as she twitches in irritation and dementia.

But we have no time. We fall, soon, into that place, beside the lake, in the darkness, amongst the strange and impossible flowers, the uncertain shadows.

Only this time, we do not fall. We find the edge, buried beneath the snow: the fissure through which we first plumetted, running from wolves. This time, we see the broken statues surrounding it, that perhaps once held some art, some magic, for swathing or shielding the place, preventing our intrusion. If so, nothing left of it, now: the stones broken and eroded by time, whatever might have been woven into their stone long since faded.

No cries, no sudden dissolving of the world, no flares of pain as we bounce from outcrop to outcrop. We step out, into the darkness, with not even a backward glance for the world we leave behind.

Drifting, descending serenely through the layers and depths, seeing as we couldn't before: the places we might have landed, the states we might have walked and dreamed of.

All dissolving with our passage, becoming as insubstantial and ephemeral as smoke.

Until we set down, familiar yet alien flowers caressing our naked ankles, the familiar smell of water on rock in the darkness, shapes and shades already emerging, already whispering to us, hissing welcomes, threats, casual curiosity.

We know them well. This time, there'll be no introductions or revelations, no gradual seduction. Our last smiles for them, their names evaporating as they go to the same stuff as discarded memory, as they flee, realising the apocalypse we represent.

Dust and echoes left, the ones that fled, the ones that remained, the thin and unlikely darkness in which they carved their kingdoms, their nurseries: places that stretched for many, many miles underground: a tomb kingdom of the happy dead, in which black and mouldering skeletons and barely held together corpses perpetually lit their blue torches, engaged in their absurd sports and arenas. A worm-realm of eaten hollow tunnels, a labyrinth whose sides glowed with luminous excretions, their creators singing through their maws full of rock and earth, choirs that rang out amongst the other kingdoms, that lulled them to sleep or roused them from dreams. Underground forests of luminous, crystal trees, their jagged structures shimmering with all colours, surrounded with refracted rainbows, the strange, spidery forms that tended them of the same stuff and substance, weaving the light into webs that stretched and clotted between the boughs.

All dust, now. Not even darkness: only this grey emptiness, that I have trailed since I first fell, since I first realised the absurdity of this dream.

And now, him, whose dust is still warm between our fingers, that still snares in our eye-lashes, whose name we cannot recall, but who we see smiling his strange, lop-sided smile, whose scales shimmer with nacreous bands of colour with every motion, whose tail scrapes along the rock and stone behind him, whose mane bursts into blue and green flame when he's excited or afraid, amused or aroused.

Why? Why can't I remember his name? The others...they are more fixed, more certain in my memory, though I know I never shared anything close to the same intimacies with them.

Not a single marriage, an isolated affair, but countless; a million lifetimes lived together, down here in the darkness. Sometimes happy, sometimes not: always, always adored, regardless, regretted when they finally came to their ends.

I met him here, in the snow, just like every time before. But, this time, I knew him, and he knew me. He said he'd dreamed of me, wept it through a smile, his teeth shimmering, dripping their purple venom. He said he knew I'd come, even before the cries began, before the silence that consumed them.

He knew, and knew what I'd do.

But came anyway, to see me one last time.

"And it is the last, isn't it?"

No more wakings, no more revolutions or rebirths. I've broken the engine, through my remembering: by infesting the child that was and showing him days he has yet to live and now, never will. Time and history are undone, and we are flailing at their ragged edges, hastening their decay.

This dust is all that's left. That, and the rumour of him that lingers in it. As it rises, sifting from the snow, from my hands, it forms a vague, smeared shape:

An echo, a rumour of him. Not even of the thing I knew, but of another: the child that went before, that perhaps fell or fled into the dark, that was stolen and secreted in it:

A youth, long limbed, attenuated, shimmering in the snow. He writhes, hating that he's returned to this half forgotten atrocity, this accident of birth, crying silently to me with his distorted jaw, pleading with me to either end it or return him to the condition he adored.

It takes so little; a blown kiss, and he's gone, dispersing into the snow.

I kneel for a while, wondering if perhaps the snow will bury me here, freeze the blood in my veins and allow me to sustain as a semi-living statue at the edge of all creation; a marker of the calamity that might have been.

Then, I stand, the frost on my skin melting, my veins pumping molten darkness. Oblivion flails and pulses at my back, the wounds I've carved in creation widening, merging to become more terminal hurts. It demands, with its silence, its emptiness: to be fed, to be evangelised to all who will listen and those who will not.

Happy enough, in that, now that there's nothing left for me above or below. Now that I've murdered the dream of my own strange Eden, and the possibility of waking from it.

Maybe, after it's done, when there's nothing left but this dust and the echoes that swirl and whisper in it, I'll pierce the mountainside from within, have it spill out into the waking world, let those I've left to suffer and shiver there have some measure of peace.

Perhaps, if forgiveness is a capacity I ever learn.

Until then, I'm happy to leave them to their wolves and their fireside stories, to the beasts in the wood that steal and devour their children, to the changelings that transform stolen infants into wolves and ravens.

Until then, there are still songs to silence, dreams to murder, an abyssal god to feed.

And maybe, maybe, when there's nothing left, when even the dust and echoes die, when there's not even darkness, I can dream something new. Something more. Something so terrible it will infest the dull, insipid imaginings of those that made me, and inspire new nightmares in its turn.

Her eyes are empty now. She cannot see. That's all right. The man by the window, grunting in the pale light, can do nothing. He wants to do nothing, other than scritch and scratch in his tattered sketch book, to record her here, at the end, as no one ever could in life.

It's all right. I'm here, Nikolai is here, to stroke her hair, to listen to the whispers in her skull, her flesh. I don't know what will happen when her last breath hitches, when her cankered heart grows still. Ha! Maybe it never will; maybe the things that have made their nests and nurseries of its chambers will keep it pulsing forever. A strange kind of life, I suppose.

She loves them so much, her unborn children, the things birthing and devouring their young in her cold meat, her suppurating bone. I see them in her hair, feel them: the silvery fleas that sing as they devour her, that I distress with every stroke.

The man at the window, the artist, as he thinks of himself, grunts in frustration, appalled at me, that I can sit here and fawn over her, afte everything we've done, everything we've been to one another, that I allowed her to come to this.

Not my doing, not my dream! Nothing I could do, after she made her wishes plain. This, this is all she desired, at the end: to lie and listen to her children's parasite hymns, to whisper their numerous names, singing them like a nursery rhyme to herself.

Not to me, never to me. Unworthy of their songs, as I am of being their host. The fleas, the worms...they retreat from me, recoiling from my touch.

That's all right, too. I never loved them, not like her. My siblings, she called them, when she still spoke to me, before her tongue swelled and her throat filled to bursting with tainted blood: my brothers and sisters. Never understanding, never knowing them as such. My true siblings, the hundreds she birthed from her belly, that she dreamed and breathed and wept and spat into being, all dead now, along with the stars they sired, the worlds they wrote and painted.

I am the last, and so is this place: a scrap, a mote of being, that she has sustained for so long, against every entropy and apocalypse, against fire and cold and corruption, against the rising and drying of oceans, the withering of woods, the collapse of every nexus and corner of creation.

This place, this sanctuary, sustaining, until its architect herself no longer dreams.

"I don't know why you're wasting your time. There's no one to see."

The artist doesn't glance up from his work, maybe doesn't even hear me. He didn't even when the screams of a million murdered children rose from the vale below, when their souls raked and scraped at the walls, the gates, the windows. Barely even blinked. Not even when the angels of a thousand different Heavens descended, hurling themselves against the walls and windows, singing such temptations to us as to make their fallen brothers blush. Not even when they started to wither and sicken, when the silence stole their exquisite songs. Not when the stars that sired them and they sired in their turns started to flicker out.

"There's you."

I almost laugh. Almost cry out. The first voice, save for those of the unborn, that I've heard in so long, so long. Dry and dusty, croaking and quavering, the most unlovely thing, compared to the choirs she contains, but, against the silence that presses in from outside?; The poetry of angels.

Barely pausing in his renditions, his chalk and charcoal and blood smeared fingers moving over the page, tearing failed or preliminary sketches free, letting them fall like Autumnal leaves around his chair, to drift into the nearby fire.

A time when there might have been some ritual element to it all, when the symbolism of our state might have spawned new states of being. I've seen it happen, watched her dance and sing worlds, witnessed her tears and poetry become stars, her blood the oceans from which new gods arise, as I did, though from what manner of effluent she would never tell.

"The last...the last."

The artist sneers, eyes roving to and fro like a bird's enraptured by some clockwork engine, some machine in perpetual motion.

"Don't think that means anything. You were lucky; that's all."

As was he, though he seems to be in denial of the fact. Yes, I was lucky. I came to her, wretched and bleeding and empty, as I so often did, seeking her pity, her milk and songs. Why she ever indulged me, I can't say: I was never the most beautiful, the strongest or most inspired. When I think of the brothers and sisters that have gone before, who have been forgotten, while I have survived and sustained to her final days, to the last days of all...

No, there is no poetry here, no artist's intent, no wider purpose. Maybe, maybe, we might have made that together, once. Maybe we could have created something more enduring than the states we did, the sad and sorry rounds that hosted the same sad and sorry creatures, portraits and gospels of the same misery, over and over and over...

We deserve our pain. She certainly does; not the Mother of all suffering, but of enough to make little difference. So much of it ours, her lost and abandoned and unwanted children, so much of her abuse heaped upon us, as though we might bear some blame for the rapes and random chances that saw us conceived, the violence with which we were born.

"You can stop, now. For Heaven's sake, you can stop."

The artist laughs, dry and rasping and humourless.

"For Heaven's sake? What has Heaven ever had to do with it? I know I can stop. I've known since the last bells ceased pealing, since the last whimpers faded. I know you won't look, wouldn't understand, even if you did. I know there's no one, except perhaps the fire."

"Then why..?"

"The void. The dark. The emptiness. When it comes, and it is so close, now, I will show it my work. I will let it gaze into my soul that I've poured out on these pages and fill me with such abyssal nothing, such a lack and silence...oh, you can't imagine. Can't imagine how much I ache for it."

He's wrong. I know that ache, to be nothing. I've known it since my first kindling, since the earliest thought. Of course I have! Wretched, writhing whelp! Ugly, deformed, diseased little grotesque! Of course I know. In the hateful light of my dead brothers and sisters, in their luminous beauty or fathomless, majestic darkness, of course I know. I should have passed long ago, become less than rumour, as they all have.

But she...she wouldn't allow it. I don't know why; she's certainly spat her share of cruelties my way in the past, heaped disgrace upon me that should have inspired hatred enough to abandon and forget her, as so many of my brothers and sisters did, before the end.

Always allowed to crawl back, to sift through the open window, the cracks in her temple walls. Always rewoven, from her milk and menses, from her spit and filth. I don't know why, even here, in extremis. Will never know and don't care to.

All I want now is to be here, to wait and watch as the fire burns low, as the whispering silence closes in, as we wither together, praying against all hope and despair that there'll be no revolution or rebirth after this, that we can go to nothing together at last.

*

I never deluded myself that there'd be any dignity at the end, when I finally felt the last of her flicker out, the last ember dying in the cold night. I never pretended that I'd be more than I've been in all of the myriad lives and states she's woven for me, that I've crafted and stolen and scavenged.

A thing of shit, always. A thing of gnawed bones and disease, of rotting flesh and deformity. The resented babe, who robbed her of all ego, who showed her at the last what monstrosity she was truly capable of creating.

But even I didn't expect this.

A scream that shudders the surrounding stone, cracking the glass in the darkened windows, that makes the wooden beams and book cases groan and splinter.

They swarm from her, the nameless and unborn children that she so loved, that she adored more than any that inherited her divinity.

Bitch! Selfish, uncaring bitch!

The last lamentations, the final cries of all creation: a spoiled child's resentment of its own birth. What else does it warrant? What else can there be?

No storm, no fire, no blood: nothing like the ends I have witnessed and sired, that I have watched her weave in her moments of ennui and disappointment, in her rages and despairs. Such ends we have seen! I wish there were time for at least one more, a world to sire, to dream, to allow to dream of itself, then to crush, crumbling it to nothing between my fingers like a grain of dust, the cries of those lost to it my only lullabies, the only diversion from my own wretchedness.

I don't try to stop them; my wiser siblings, her more beloved children. They surge from her, the sack of her last flesh withering, bursting before my eyes, the children of her rot, her diseased marrow, her black and septic soul, spilling across the stone floor, swarming across the the walls as they blister and bleed darkness, fading with every heartbeat.

The artist, the one they used to call Peake, before he went mad, before he lost all he loved and lived for, scribbling furiously, biting his lip bloody, trying to record these final moments, this ultimate decay.

Not even a whisper of love left for me, not a rumour of contempt. She is gone, the Mother of all creation, murdered by her dissatisfaction with what she spawned, the ignorance of her most beloved.

And we are left: the most wretched and diseased of her bastards, the great ones, the lords of death and storms, the makers of oceans and galaxies, the inspirations of civilisations, all long, long forgotten, no one left now to remember them, except me.

And I have forgotten most of them by my own will, out of envious spite for their beauty, their brilliance.

They feed themselves to it, the carrion and parasites she loved more than any of us, swarming to be devoured by the silence, to become emptiness in their turn.

I know that inclination, feeling it like invisible chains lodged in my entrails, drawing me away from the fireside, to the windows as they fracture, to the door as it shudders in its lintel, swelling, splintering.

Peake murmurs as he scribbles, his pencil worn to almost nothing, his fingers bleeding. Prayers to divinities that no longer exist, that wouldn't answer, even if they did.

He and I, the last. A whelp and a mad man, all that remains of everything. Every myth, every dream, every state and story.

Why not?

Standing, I stumble through them, the living, seething carpet as they worm and skitter towards the pools of expanding darkness, the absence that hurts my eyes and mind, that isn't even darkness, the mere absence of light, but nothing, a condition that even she never dreamed of, that she never believed could be, until the very end.

That she is one with, now, as my siblings are, and we all will soon be.

"Where are you going?"

Not glancing up from his work, his lips bleeding freely, now. His fingers, too.

"Nowhere."

He sniggers, understanding the joke. Maybe the only man who ever could.

"Are you coming? The fire's almost out. Not much paper left."

Piles of it surrounding him, that might have become the inspiration for hills or mountains, in a more verdant and inspired age.

Not here, where there's nothing and no one to imagine it, nothing and no one who cares.

"No, I...no. I'm going to sit for a while, and think of nothing."

Leaning back, setting down the wretched nub of his pencil, closing his book at last. With barely a flinch, he hurls it into the fire, lambent tears streaming down his face as it and he both kindle, as the pages and his skin char. He doesn't scream, doesn't even quiver, but watches as the stuff of his soul goes to ash, as its embers rise and fade.

I think I hear him laughing, as I go to the door, as I grasp the handle, so cold that frost forms upon the moulded brass, wrenching the frozen mechanism open.

Nothing. Emptiness and silence enough to make me scream, to break whatever parody of sanity I ever entertained.

Nothing.

It whispers to me, its silence sings, abyssal hymns, a suicide's lullabies. It won't merely take me, as it has everything else: it will fill me, it will undo the fact of me. Every rumour, every echo, silenced at last.

What else have I ever begged for?

"Goodbye, Peake."

A choked farewell, mutilated by fire. Then, I step out into the dark, forget myself and everything: the answer to my first choked and shrieking prayer, that of all born things, in resentment of the being they never asked for.

A happy gathering...lost friends, lost children. Found, at last, though no way home for them, for any of us.

More...more than I ever might have imagined, than have ever come before, here, at the edge of the abyss. All known to me, dear to me, their stories mine, over the decades, the centuries of their living.

Told, now, all come to this same moment, this same precipice.

The last echoes, and the first.

New stories, from here on, that even I don't know, that I can never tell.

This strange silence, this bizarre togetherness...almost maddening, after so long alone. But I do as I swore; I tell what I can, of those that are here, of those they remember; those they have loved and abandoned, adored and betrayed. Those they have abused and raped and mutilated.

Oh yes, every species of sin here, and every virtue, too.

No distinction, for my part; long since lost the ability to discern; one story as welcome as the next, pouring through and from me without any recourse but to love, and to adore the children who made them.

With every telling, a last word: none faltering, none reneging: oaths they swore to themselves, before they even took their first breaths, before thought sparked in the womb.

Happy, so happy, to have an end, to be an end, their myths echoing from this place, out, out through the spires above, into the sick and heaving skies, to the dying stars beyond. Out across wastes and desolations, across dying realms and boiling oceans, through the darkness between worlds, finding new minds in which to anchor themselves, new hosts to infest. Retold, again and again, distorted, transformed, rendered new for each teller and audience.

A matter of millennia, as long as their original telling, the living of them, but shared, here; these others, whose tales diverge and contradict, carried along; worms between the words, parasites growing fat off of other fictions.

While I wither, while I split and sift away, only dust inside.

Wavering, at the last, when there are only two left: beautiful children, serpent children; naked and bloodied sadists, smiling through their masks, the stories they tell so hideous, I almost falter, breaking the rhythms that threaten to reshape all.

Smiling, as they cling together, as they refuse. As I choke on my own dust, the last words stuttering. As the chamber shudders, as Heaven screams. As the abyss itself howls, shrieking metal, agonised voices, those already passed caught within its mechanisms, ground and pulped and shrieking to be forgotten.

Pleading with them, with my eyes, where words no longer serve; tears of dust, the most empty mourning, for a life of purpose so cruelly denied.

So beautiful, almost luminous in their allure, their hands on me cold and cruel, but welcome, so welcome, as they drag me to the edge, laughing their angel's laughter, and hurl me into my own engine; the god-machine where all stories originate, and where all now end.

Forgotten...remembered. Of course, now, here. Where else?; The place where the fires found me, and I found myself.

Still the same, after all these years...claustrophobic corridors, high flung windows, just out of reach, as though to prevent even the thought of escape, the only hint of the outside world whatever the sky has to tell.

Dust. Dust and echoes; every breath acrid with adolescent sweat, rampant hormones, tribal rages, sexual fantasies, dreams of pain and vengeance and of abuse returned three fold.

Barking teachers. Jeering boys and cackling girls. The cries of those tripped or spat upon, the odd worm turning, pummelling their abusers bloody before teachers can tear them away, often receiving bruises themselves in the process.

The stink and noise, the pain and desperation. Rare, rare flickers of beauty; a mind retreated into itself, lost in dreaming; consumed by some fantasy, of worlds read about or imagined on the spot, of video-game realms and role-playing table top games. Of cartoons and films and comic books.

Rare, rare souls; those able to deny the dust and disease of the place, to remove themselves from it, into some other state of mind and being.

Routinely snared, dragged back by the ridicules of teachers and classmates, accused of “day-dreaming,” as though there's any great sin in that, when what the waking world provides is so shallow and sceptic.

Happier there, in the realms of their own dreaming. Knowing, because I was of the same tribe, once; one of the happy lost, the unanchored and wandering, apt to float away at a moment's notice, from boredom and barbarity, from tribal idiocy and pretensions of wisdom.

One of the few who questioned, who suffered for it; who elicited gasps of disbelief from his classmates with his defiance:

“Why? What's the point?”

Told to shut up, to remove himself, dragged back for detensions after school, during lunch break.

Remembering, how they looked at him, how they glared, though rarely ever saying what was in their minds:

How dare you? How dare you question me, in my kingdom?

The child learning, through that: how truly futile it all was, how pointless and stupid the routines and systems he'd been fed through since early childhood were. How broken and damaged the sad, weary emperors and empresses of those states were.

Were.

Before this...the event that draws me back, again and again, no matter how deeply I forget, how alien I become to myself:

Permutations of the same...in the worlds I have walked, the states I've trespassed in; permutations in which the place shines, in which its students are paragons of health and freedom, where they are not denied, but encouraged and inspired, where the assumptions of their imprisonment are so far removed from those that gave rise to me as I stand, here and now, in the dust I created.

White and beautiful places, curving walls of pearl and nacreous matter, shimmering with expressions that the children write with their fingers in light and colour, that they project onto the structure with their thoughts, their inspirations.

Nothing denied, nothing censored, from what would be considered lewd and lurid here to the violent, the sadistic, the graphic:

All welcome, the artists responsible so far beyond the feral, stinking, bestial ghosts that surround me, they may as well be of another species.

Remembering...my first. Why, I don't even know, now: only that the fact of her; her abused and lunatic eyes, her cackling, desperate voice, her baboon smile, that turned her face into a distorted clown mask every time she tripped some kid in the corridor, every time she cried that some poor boy had made her pregnant and forced her to abort the babe, every time she slapped some random girl in the corridor or spat in their face...

Arousing fantasies that shamed me, once upon a time; back when I was capable of such foolishness: fantasies of sadism that I scribbled down in my myriad journals and notebooks, that I sometimes used as inspiration for art projects (my parents, whose names and faces I can't recall, called in for discussions on the subject, hour long sessions with the school councillor, in which she pretended some understanding of what I expressed).

Fantasies of blades and blood, of bondage and burning. The things I did to her in my head...a litany of sadism to shame the most canonised of serial killers, to make Jeffrey Dahmer wince and recoil.

Fantasies only, no different, in their ways, than the myriad others swirling in the dust around me, now: dreams of vengeance upon teachers who dared to ignore or shame us, who screamed and snarled at us, who quivered us with their sarcasm, made us writhe like worms in our seats. Upon the leering, ape-like ones whose unthinking violence became the measure of our days.

Never me, the girl never saying a single word to me, just like most of them; the abused abusers, the victimisers, the violent ones. Most of them bizarrely fond of me, treating me with odd respect, like some sort of mascott. Scenting, perhaps, what she became the focus of, that day.

Remembering, through the fog and storms of years; time that none of us are born to comprehend or endure...

Lifetimes separating us; the child that was, the not-quite-man that is; the former as much a ghost now as those he shares the dust with:

No spur, no particular event or circumstance inspiring the moment: seeing her, from down the dimly lit corridor, in a rough line outside of Mr. Heldridge's history class. The same gaggle of twitchy, nervous, idiot companions, quivering from and laughing at her cruelties, not realising that they would become their subjects just as readily when all other opportunities exhausted themselves.

Seeing her, seeing all of them. Knowing, even then, even as the child I was -barely thirteen in body, already ancient in mind-, that she was nothing; not the source or inspiration of it, merely the focal point, the cypher.

Feeling it, as I sometimes had before, during moments of strange exultation or particular despair, in arousal or inspiration: that same lightning, the potential for transformation in my cells. A sense as of lifting from the ground, of lightning arcing from my fingertips, fire at the corners of my eyes and mouth.

Far more than a dream, this time.

Knowing, when the mutters in the corridor took on a new timbre, when eyes turned to me, when cries and screams came.

Remembering...raising a hand to my eyes, laughing at its translucence, the light that ran in its veins, the fire that seeped from its whorls and ridges, liquid like sweat, rolling in fluid beads to my finger tips, coalescing there, bursting into flickers of blue lightning or dripping up, to kindle on the ceiling.

Laughing, having imagined this moment more times than I could count, knowing it would come, from my earliest fantasies; prophecies conjured in the womb or before.

Only just begun to doubt, through my disappointments at the world; that, even in the most intense and soul-burning moments, the fires died, nothing manifesting.

And the cold that followed...oh, that cold! Knowing it well; almost enough to drive me to tears, to self-excoriation, raking at myself with bitten ragged nails, biting deep into the flesh of my arms, my hands...sometimes enough to make myself bleed, offering it as sacrament to whatever passing powers might hear, might help me realise what I ached for...

Running, now; murmurs rising to screams and cries, as they stampeded, as they fled, the surrounding corridor kindling, blue and green and blazing gold fire spreading across the walls, floor and ceiling, teachers emerging from their classrooms, bellowing demands for calm, before seeing, before joining the route.

The first emergence, the singularity that transformed not only me, but this sad, sorry state I was born to.

The girl that was its focus...her ghost coalescing before me, now; a naked, distorted thing, simultaneously ancient and snared in a state of hateful adolescence, its smeared face stretched in a perpetual scream, raking at its own dust with hideously elongated fingers.

Her blood and burning flesh in my nostrils, her voice in my thoughts:

...Stop. Stop...please...

Laughing, unable to help myself, remembering how she glared at me, how her companions abandoned her, fleeing down the corridor, not sparing her a second glance, not caring to drag her away from the fire.

Finding others, too; not just her. Others I didn't know and never will, licking their backs, their flailing legs, their screaming faces... not all of them burned:

Those who dreamed, those who found ways of sustaining their essential selves, beyond the ruin that unwanted being might have worked on them, kindling in other ways, becoming like me; pyres of their own imagining, screams turning to laughter as they blazed in their turns:

A blonde, quivering boy grinning from ear to ear as he exploded into a state of light and luminous dust, as his new condition flapped its wings, spreading further embers throughout the structure. A pale, dark-haired girl, raising her hands to the flock of shadow-born ravens that swirled and croaked around her, plucking her fleshless, leaving her a thing of bone and blue fire, smiling through its own immolation, apparently well content with its condition.

My tribe; the tribeless, the species of one.

The nameless, glaring girl, the victim who made all the world her victim, not moving, not trying to flee.

Staring as I approached, as the corridor flowered around her.

No words or recriminations, what I brought...nothing she didn't already possess, that she hadn't dreamed for herself, again and again and again.

Not even screaming, as the fires found her, as she blistered, bled, as the flesh bubbled and sloughed from her, leaving behind a charred, quivering skeleton, raking itself to unhappy ash.

My first, that conflagration...so intimate, feeling every tongue of flame that licked across and throughout her body, her mind...tasting every darkened recess, every corpse-strewn swamp inside; the places where she cast her shames and guilts and despairs, where they festered, becoming mires so polluted, their stink poisoned every inch of her being.

Not my doing; not even the fire's. Her own work, as it's always been, as she'll never allow herself to know.

Swirling my fingers through her dust, watching her come apart, distort, only to recohere, agonised by my touch.

...please...make it...stop...

Still? After all these years?

Sighing, inhaling her, tasting her madness and despair, her hatred of me and herself; of everything that is...

“You know I can't. Why do you still cling to this? Haven't you made enough Hell for yourself?”

The spectre weeping, retreating from me down the corridor, lashing out at all it passes, disrupting and distorting them, not realising that they aren't like her; shadows and echoes, incapable of appreciating her sadism, just as she's incapable of acknowledging what she inflicts on herself.

If she only knew, if I can only show her...what she precipitated, what I've seen and done...where I've wandered in the centuries since...what she might be, if she'll only allow it.

Following, calling to her, though she denies me, though she flees and disperses, though she lashes out, attempting to dissuade me with her violence.

Nothing she can do, any more than there was all those years ago, when we became Father and Mother to one another, more intimate than twins in the womb. Nowhere she can hide from me, in this place; sensing her, wherever she cowers, terrified of knowing, of accepting what I have to give.

Intent on this; my last gift, before I kindle again, and what remains of this place, this womb of dust, is finally forgotten.

This slow dying, that I ache for in the Summer months...burning cold, setting fingers and thoughts alight, a blue fire in my chest.

Witch's fire, imagining myself breathing it, igniting every bronzed and beautiful sun child, every slave of Summer. Laughing as they writhe, as beauty goes to black filth on their bones, as laughter kindles to hate in their eyes.

A cruel fantasy, though not the first, certainly not the last. What does it even matter, with no means to make it more?

Snow on the canals, hideous green waters not frozen, but somehow denser, congealing towards a state of ice or jelly. Pausing at the image, grasping the cold, rusted balustrade, staring down into the murk that reflects nothing:

Something beneath, coiling through the muck, serpentine bodies or quivering tendrils, rearing up, too wreathed in shit and filth to discern, screams as they constrict around barges and narrow boats, breaking them in two, dragging them down...as they lash out, plucking people from the path, from spanning bridges, pulling them apart, their remains raining down, turning the mire below into a rancid stew.

More hideous dreaming? A day for it, clearly; a day that most lament, surrounded by blasphemous complaints of it all fucking day; perpetual, Pavlovian remarks on the cold, the snow, the wind...weary, whinging tones, dead-eyed, drear expressions that look like badly fitting masks, that I might reach out and pluck away...

Those I walk with, the stream of humanity already threatening to become torrential as 5PM nears...all similarly dour, resentful; huddled and hooded, swathed in successive layers of winter coats, gloves, scarves and ear-muffs. Those that aren't...snarling and squinting, muttering quiet curses against the wind.

Happy to be the rock around which they break, refusing to be swept along by their desperation, their wittling, idiot fear of beauty. Happy to endure their snide looks, their sidelong glares, their muttered curses.

So very British; not a one stopping to challenge me, not a one making a remark above an unintelligible grumble.

The fire kindling in my fingers, now; the tips of my nose and ears, searing nerves, making them dance; a welcome pain, making me hiss breath through a rictus grin; the smile of something dead and in love with the condition.

Maybe I am; maybe I'll remember, after so long forgetting; finally peel away this mask named Indu Sunya, this face that has always felt like something borrowed, and become the abortive child of my own imagining.

Maybe...

No. An adolescent ache, that I refuse to entertain. No longer a child; dreams fine, in their place, when not indulged as I once did, to the despair of my family, my friends; almost to my ruination.

Flying, eyes closed, talons of frost-bitten wind raking my face, tears streaming as I become molten, as my back ripples and breaks, as great wings unfurl...

Laughing at myself, my own absurdity, some pausing in the stream's flow to throw confused, fretful looks my way.

No angel's flight, no laughing from on high, no rain of moonight tears to rouse the rest of humanity from despairing slumber.

A fractured skull, dislocated arm; four broken ribs, severe concussion. Lucky to escape with just that, or so they tell me.

Part of me still doubting, still believing that it happened as memory insists; that they took me, dragged me to earth, bound and mutilated me, to prevent me from inspiring the rest to sprout wings and fly...

I can't. Can't even entertain it. No knowing what will happen, if I do. Distractions. The pretty boy, with his blue, blue eyes, a crooked smile, as he catches me looking. The stinking drunk, muttering incoherently to himself, rousing complaints as he veers from one side of the path to the other, disrupting the stream's flow.

Not enough. Never enough; not my job, not friends or family. Not anything. The urge so strong; to jump into the foetid, freezing waters, part of me knowing that the things in their depths will find me, invade and remake me, raise me up like Scylla, transformed into something hideous and glorious, that I'll lash this ridiculous city to splinters, freeze it to glitteing waste with me breath...

Knowing that, if I fly again, there'll be nothing they can do; that I'll soar beyond their reach, laugh my scorn into their frozen, fractured faces, watch them fly apart, revealing the rancid, cockroach things beneath their facades.

Knowing, and despairing at the prospect of another tomorrow, of waking only to find myself here, again, on the same dead men's paths, following in dead thing's footsteps, over and over and over, until I join them, just another victim of the slow dying, the unravelling world.

No screams, as I clamber over the balustrade, some muted calls, muffled pleas; no efforts to stop me.

The fire consuming me, blazing from my throat, my palms, shrivelling my eyes in their sockets, leaving me as a bizarre species of Ifrit, not born of desert, but arctic waste.

The way between unremembered, seeming to almost teleport from the moment I stepped out of my front door to this. One second, terraces, schools, white clad and red brick houses, fenced off fields, locked and chained industrial estates.

The next?; Sunlight filtering through trees, frost on weeds and banks of earth, a low-lying mist coiling across fields that undulate into the distance, disappearing into shadowed forestland.

Not noticing the cries of crows and gulls and children, the former two squabbling over scraps on the frozen earth, the latter with one another in the playgrounds and schoolyards, already driven half mad by their imprisonment.

Too much inside your own head, Harry, that you are...

An old mantra, familiar condemnation.

Too much inside your own head...

No curse, insofar as I'm concerned; never has been, though I'm so often sealed away from the world, though I sometimes don't see people I pass or say hello to those I know...though they ring or text me later, wondering if they've said something to upset me, accusing me of looking right at them, right through them...

Most understanding; shrugging it off as just how I am. Happy to let them have that, though it doesn't mean a great deal.

Happier there, in whatever dream-world I walk, whatever waste or wood or mountain I wander, with the dream things that infest them; the fey, the dragons; the things that have no name, because they're mine; my creations, as close as I'll ever come to children...

Lurching out of myself, this time, away from a long, white beach, curving around the roots of great, black mountains, the sea singing as it laps the shore...

Torn away, as violent and involuntary as any birth, as protested.

A sound, tearing my attention out and away, to the dense trees off to my right; a sound I've never heard before along this path, though I walk it almost every day:

Some animal...a shriek that rises, ululating, before dying to silence; some chimpanzee set upon by its siblings in cannibal frenzy, in incestuous assault.

Pausing, peering through the foliage, seeing nothing but shadows, the skittering silver of squirrels and rabbits.

Making to move on, when the sound comes again. Louder this time, longer; much, much closer. A rising shriek, not seeming so animal this time; almost like a child, a babe..?

I've heard foxes down here before; seen them on occasion, chasing squirrels or rooting trash through the undergrowth. Pretty things; blazing red or dusty yellow, bright green eyes. But not what people think; not like cartoons or puppets: often scarred and mangey, flea-infested, mutilated from whatever battles they fight in the undergrowth...qualities that only make them prettier, in my eyes.

When they cry, for mates or as a warning to rivals, out of grief for murdered and devoured young, they sound like babes whimpering, like tortured women screaming.

I hear them in my dreaming places, sometimes; the strange woods I walk there, where the trees writhe as though in fire, where they resemble the intertwined bodies of burning women, blackened beyond all sex and distinction by invisible flames. Hear them amongst the red grasses and fleshy flowers, where they rise bloody-muzzled from their feasts, scraps and tatters hanging from their jaws, eyes luminous in thanks.

Nothing quite so familiar, here; the sound so unlike a fox or rabbit, like the squirrels that chatter and squeal to one another, the buzzards and kestrels that sometimes dive down to snatch them from the grass, carrying them up, up into the clouds, sometimes dropping them to snare brokenly in the branches below.

The trees stirring, breaking from their agonised dances, their tormented love making, to grasp the invader, to drag him back into the flames, where he burns, where they claw and kiss him apart, using his filth to water their roots, to fertilise the surrounding soil...

Turning with a smile, the man a dumpy, doughy creature, red-cheeked and worry-eyed, ugly, tattered tracksuit bottoms straining around his lower half, the meek greyhound at his side eyeing him as she shivers.

“Why's that?”

“Ye not read it in th' paper t'other day?; Some kiddy wen' missin' down 'ere. People said they 'eard summat, but...”

Turning from him, silently praying for him to move on. Feeling his eyes on my back as I return to the edge of the path, step between the trees.

Cracking branches underfoot, crushed weeds and wildflowers. A pungency of wild garlic. Skitters of movement in the undergrowth, the boughs overhead. No sign of any big cat, alligator or otherwise.

Waiting, hoping the sound will come again.

A flicker of motion, but distant; catching my eye through the low-lying mist, disappearing between the trees at the far edge of the field, into woods where I won't follow.

No big cat. No alligator; nothing any zoo has ever boasted.

Knowing it, with the immediacy of love, the scintillation of hate: one of mine, somehow escaped, torn its way through, to the waking now.

The briefest impressions: a bloated bulk, shimmering as though wet, pitted and seeping, viscous matter dribbling down its flanks, many legs, pawing through the grasses, rising to taste the air.

Gone, melting into the shadows of the wood before I can even catch my breath. How? How can it be here?

Resisting a lunatic urge to follow, to flee after it, call it back, beg it to explain.

“'Ere, you all right, mate?”

My doughy, self-appointed guardian, quietly cursing his dog for growling in the back of its throat. Staring after, hoping to catch the beast re-emerging, to find myself wrong, deceived by my own fevered imagination...

Just a fox or badger, caught up in a tattered bin-bag.

But knowing, knowing otherwise.

“Mate! You okay?”

“I'm fine.”

The way I used to snarl at my Mother, when she repeated such idiot questions.

“All right, mate, all right! Jus'...ye know, don't want yer to end up like that kiddie..!”

Smiling, almost laughing, making my way back to the path. My companion as faithful as his dog, still waiting, a distinct glare of fear in his eyes.

“Ye find anythin'?”

Almost confessing, the story buzzing in my throat, behind my eyes: I saw something from my nightmares.

Sighing, shaking my head. “No. Just a fox or something, I reckon.”

The man nodding sagely, as though this is profoundest revelation, never meeting my eyes, seeing something in them he doesn't quite like.

Glancing at the dog, its arched back, its terrified, bulging eyes, the wet stain on the concrete at its feet.

“Yes, you'd better do that.”

The man nodding, slinking away, dragging one foot as though partially lame. So sad, so sad a creature, so eager to be friends with one who will never, never reciprocate.

Letting him go, not even taking a step until he turns away, some meters up the path. Pretending I don't see his farewell wave, hearing him curse ripely at his hound, dragging it along as it shivers and seeps.

Long abandoned any hope of arriving before the last sun, before its red paints the ruins. Hoping only to see them, one last time; before light itself ends, and day becomes a memory.

The dark at my heels, devouring land and distance and time; memory and experience and everything, everything, everything.

Not a wound; a wound might heal, a wound might be stitched or bound. No...absence, the obliteration of even possibility. Devouring all; every star, every dream, every playground I've ever known.

Leaving only this; the last, decaying outposts of being, the temples erected against it, by those I no longer remember, those already given to it: the mad ones who maybe still wander, who still scrape some semblance of living from the shattered stone.

So cold, here; the dusk scarlet and heavy, shadows dense, almost fungal. Dead trees, dead flowers; grasses dried to shards and splinters. Great idols and sepulchers, partially swallowed by the earth, listing at strange angles, shattered or obscured by infestations of long dead weeds.

Distantly, within the walls, beneath the earth...music, the stuttering rhythms of the engines they built, that they stole and scavenged and cannibalised; murdered entire civilisations and species to attain, orchestrated wars and genocides and pogroms and apocalypses to shame any and all in history to discover.

Hated, denied; many not believing, not understanding, even when they saw evidence of it with their own eyes: the emptiness undoing all, swallowing their creeds and cultures, their empires that spanned stars and realities...some even concocting their own means of sustaining against it, of insulating themselves...

Dead dreams, now. Forgotten.

Scrabbling, a serrated knife twisting in my belly, hunger that has waxed over leagues and miles of desolation, where there has been nothing, nothing to sustain; nothing to even sift from the air or dig up from the charred dunes. No bones to gnaw or sewage to sup on; no vermin to devour.

Not even ghosts. Even ghosts can provide sustenance, to those who know the means of their rendering.

Laughing, knowing that I've endured worse, though I can't recall where or when; what faces I wore, what roles I played.

Maybe for the best; maybe what we all deserve, at the end:

No more deceptions, no more theatres; only the unravelling we have denied and denied and denied with every mask, every contrived and practised verse, every orchestrated step of the dance.

At last.

Grinning, though many of my teeth are gone or shattered, grasping at a nearby statue to keep myself from toppling, bursting open against the soil, seeping away...

The scarlet sun blazing through a curious circle carved into the uppermost spire, clearly designed to capture its light at this point and channel it, a shimmering pool of arterial red staining the surrounding earth, animating the shadows, making the statues seem to grin or sneer, to weep blood or sorrow for the surrounding desolation.

Knowing their names, once; vague impressions of the saints and messiahs that inspired them: misty, smeared faces, far removed from those purportedly carved in their likeness, those that once bent knee to them, praying for guidance, not entertaining the least clue as to the truth of them in life; this one's flatulence, that one's penchant for bedding a different lover every evening, eventually losing his voice and tongue to a rot he contracted as a result. That one's casual cruelties for those that defied her word.

Saints and martyrs, prophets and messiahs.

Drunks and whore-mongers, perverts and sadists.

All one and the same, all equally forgotten, soon enough.

Maybe why I'm here; not to see, not to play witness to the final hours of light, but to hasten the end? So difficult to remember, now...so intent on the journey, on reaching this point, I've forgotten why.

Maybe they could have told me, once; the forgotten ones, my companions gone to bone and nothing along the way.

No more. Not even in dreams.

The emptiness yawning, not even cold, not attempting to snare or seduce; no need, its inevitability beyond denial, even here, in the last place, in the light of the last star.

Resisted, all this time, never turning to look, not even when I physically felt the leagues falling away at my heels, memories of the last steps and heartbeats flying apart. Warned, again and again and again: that to see it will be the end, that I'll not survive or be able to resist; that it will take me, the stories I have sewn, leaving not even echoes or shadows behind.

The urge all but irresistable, now. At least I'll have that, at the end: a moment, a heartbeat of the most terrible purity, the only perfection that can ever be. Then, I'll be one with it, and with all that will never be again.

*

The gates long since torn away, walls rent and collapsed; shattered in numerous assaults and cataclysms, sabotages and betrayals.

Remembering...the stories I've heard, the rumours that have whispered on the winds from this place: the temple perpetually under siege, by its last days, those that denied the very notion of oblivion in common cause with those that regarded it as holy; the final solution of whatever creator and destroyer they worshiped.

Smiling at that, the bitter irony; that even gods succumbed to it. I've seen, watched them stand against it, rouse all the Arts at their disposal to forestall it.

The eldest, the most omnsicient...coming apart, consumed, before breathing a single ember, not even slowing it.

Old gods. New gods. Dark gods. Blood and fertility and elemental gods. Gods that were men and women, once; re-written and made mythic by their own hands, through rites or technology, through Arts and stolen status...all of them failing, no matter what they roused or brought to bear.

None left, now; no prayers to court them.

Only me, and this place; the engines woven throughout its every inch, whose circuits thread its stone and shattered pillars, its strange statues and icons.

I don't understand...why I'm here, why I came, why I was sent. How I've been able to outrun it where so many have stumbled, been forgotten in a thought's span.

Comapnions, co-conspirators, lovers. Betrayers. Too painful to even try; the temple's burned and broken interior shimmering before my eyes, seeming unfixed, a paused image on old and warped VHS tape, about to tear and fray apart under the strain.

Alien structures; pillars that resemble the bones of titans, sculptures of molten wax, coral-like and sea-shell formations; things grown rather than carved or sculpted. Others betraying themselves; examples of the strange machinery that the temple and its surroundings are part of; that threads invisibly through the air, on shafts of light, in the shadows: pulsing, churning masses, states impossible to discern; seeming one moment to resemble flowing, molten plastic, the next to swell into organ and nerve-like systems married to bizarre devices.

Forms visible amongst the conflux, subsumed within it, protruding from it; the only certain elements in otherwise maddening ephemera:

Slumbering things, their elongated heads bowed against their chests, arms crossed, wires and umbilici threaded through their anatomies, binding them to the temple and its systems.

Its priests and architects, its dreamers and makers.

Told not to look, not to touch, but by who, I can no longer recall. Looking regardless, no longer caring if the sight of them drives me mad, bursts my eyes in their sockets, makes my mind bleed. What difference does it make, with oblivion aching at the door?

No such punishment for my trespass; the creatures stirring as I step ito their midst, raising their elongated, swollen heads, dark eyes blinking, amber lights blazing in their depths.

Their attentions spitting me, unseen spears of fascination, pinning me from all sides, hoisting me up quivering and gasping, filled with the cold light of a Winter dawn.

Inside, scouring my emptiness, surgeon's fingers running over the hollows where memory has collapsed or been torn from me, whispering to me and one another in their strange, mellifluous tongue that seems comprised entirely of hymns.

A hideous illumination; allowing me to see as they do; how mutilated I am, a rag-doll thing, scraps and tatters of self, barely held together.

The spears retreating, apparently satisfied with their autopsy, letting me fall, crying out as bones splinter, as wounds tear against the shattered stone floor.

Not understanding their strange whispers, but catching stray echoes of emotion; a bleak humour that rises in my throat like laughter riding a vomit of blood, a weary sadness, that things have failed, that there will never be a second experiment.

Over. Nothing they or any of us can do. The most ancient, the first and last, who I have come in search of, hoping they might have something, know anything...not a means of forestalling the inevitable...I see that, now; not even me and mine were naïve enough to hope for that...only something; some secret or revelation that we might take with us, into nothing and forgetting; that might make sense of the endless, idiot round of deaths and resurrections, of the lives we have lived over and over and over...

But no; nothing here, nothing they can or will say, at the end. Nothing I might understand, even if it were otherwise.

Rising, gasping blood on every breath, spitting on the stones at my feet.

Turning from them, from my path, at last, heading out, into the crimson dusk, where I look upon nothing at last, and lose myself in its perfection.

Wandering back and forth in front of the clinic, wondering if anyone notices from the upper window, if they watch, thinking: What the Hell is she doing? Is she mental or something?

Wouldn't blame them. How I must seem. How I feel.

Outside of myself yet also lodged deep, a splinter in my own brains and belly, twisting, growing sceptic...

Poison thoughts, lacing every consideration; paranoid, anxious idiocies: This man, with his perpetual scowl...scowling at me, murder in his eyes. Smearing me with a glance as he passes, leaving me as little more than a stain on the pavement. This woman and her screaming children, rolling her eyes, sighing. Not at them. At me, at me. Another obstacle, another unwanted distraction.

Strangers not the worst; people I know, people who purport to love me...I know. I know. What they think, what they sometimes say, whispering in their little cabals, their secret meetings at Moms and Trevor's...the messages they swap on line, the texts they send.

Some of them found, though they don't know it. Some of them read.

Some of them less cowardly, sent directly:

Lisa,

I know we've never got on all that well. I don't know why. But why don't we see you anymore? Was it what Trevor said at Gloria's funeral? He didn't mean to upset you, none of us did. People are worried about you. It's like you hardly speak to anybody, these days. Please us a call or pop over. We can talk, if you want.

Love,

Mom. XXX

The letter torn, partially screwed up before I even finished reading it. Not her; this concerned, fretting woman, this woman that suddenly cares what I think, what I feel.

Too late, too late, Mom. For a long time, now.

Early, as always. For everything. Another one of the anxieities she handed down to me, afflicted on me. Doctor Weathers likely already waiting in her office, having cleared her schedule, after last night. Panic, breathless, a frantic call.

I won't. Not today. No matter the rain, the cold; no matter the lightning searing my nerves. Late. Late, late, late...the word, the concept alone enough to make me breathless.

Stopping, closing my eyes, not caring what those who pass by make of it; that they tut and mutter and stare:

Forcing the world to slow, time to wind down. Not gasping, drawing in several deep breaths, imagining warm sea water, tinted amber by setting sun, washing over me, through me...

Calm. A moment, a place...maybe a memory: some childhood holiday from when I was a toddler, before the machinery of remembering had even fully calibrated itself.

White sand, warm sun... a forest of strange trees to the West, bounded by a broken wooden fence, mountains to the South, a small chalet in their shadow. Where we slept, where we bathed and ate breakfast, where Dad drank his vile, black coffee, before we headed down to the water's edge every day...

Barely a heartbeat, but enough. Sun giving way to murk and rain, calm to a more serene state of anxiety; enough to let me function, to seem as though I'm not a lunatic, an alien in a poorly fitting human skin.

Away from the clinic, though there are only fifteen minutes to go; back, back the way I came from, against the tide, the strange eyes, tuts and disapproving mutters, not one actually speaking, not one saying hello.

To the church, with its dark, high-arched windows, its plinth; a grassy hillock, raised and recessed from the road.

So out of place, amongst the scattering of electronics shops and hair-dressers; a structure from another time, better suited to surroundings of fields and forests.

The path rising beneath my feet as I head up the small lane down its right hand side; the houses here a strange confusion of modern structures and other anachronisms; those that clearly serve the church, and have done for some time, others looking as though they were erected throughout the years then successively modernised; fitted with double-glazing and extensions, conservatories and annexes.

So quiet, even the clamour of the road fading, though it's still clearly visible. A moment of thought for Doctor Weathers, a twitchy, nervous woman herself, always gnawing on a pen or fidgeting with her clothes, as though afraid they might decay around her, that they might suddenly constrict and crush her mosquito frame.

Grinding my teeth at the thought of it; sitting in that chair, pouring out my woes and secrets to her.

Though she's helped me so much. Though she's kept me from crisis, on more than one occasion. I don't like her; haven't from the first moment we met. Telling her so, during one of our sessions. The woman shrugging, fiddling with a loose strand of hair:

“We aren't required to like one another, Lisa. We're not here to be friends.”

No, no, and that's good, because we never will be.

Away. Away from the clinic. From letters. From watches. From Doctor Weathers. From prescriptions and pills and plastic-politeness.

Away.

This lane, descending down the back of the hill, winding like a great, flattened snake, the road itself poorly maintained, cracked and broken, rain welling from its wounds like infected blood, gurgling down its gutters, carrying a freight of dirt and leaves.

Not knowing why I pull the gate open, its rust coming away in my palm, biting into my fingers. Not knowing why I follow the winding, overgrown path between the stones.

Serenity. Sweeter than any pills or memories -fantasies- of childhood beaches might bring; a sense of utter calm, stillness inside. Almost alien to me; a state that has me stumbling to a halt, a hand to my chest, a strange smile spreading across my face.

What is this?

Crows and magpies calling, perched on the lop-sided, moss-crawling gravestones, the boughs of the great, leafless sycamores and rowans that sprout between them.

The legends on the stones all but illegible, stained or weathered beyond interpretation, those rotting beneath long, long, long forgotten, no doubt, outside of some obscure church records.

Give us a call. Or pop round, if you like.

“No,” smiling, “no, I don't think I will. Not any time soon.”

Following the way, the path diversifying amongst the irregular ranks and clusters of graves, not even checking my watch, certain that my session has begun, by now; that Doctor Weathers will be calling to check up on me.

Always so punctual; what my teachers, my bosses, love about me. Its lack something I loathe in others, that Doctor Weathers tells me I need to understand at a base level: where does that anxiety derive from? What do I think is going to happen if someone is two or three or ten minutes late?

Crows cawing as they take flight, more than I thought, the magpies following suit. So many, so many...enough to obscure the graveyard, the church...to blot out the sky.

Not flailing, not panicking; no familiar constriction, no lightning scorching my nerves, no storm waxing in my belly...only weightlessness, a sense of lurching forward, of the ground abruptly falling away, leaving me...

Not flying. Not falling. Drifting. A feather-thing, bones lighter than those of the birds that this new state is comprised of, that dart and flutter throughout every inch of space, that caw and croak and shriek and peck, though only at themselves, one another, leaving me untouched...

Poison. Tainted meat. Rotten mind.

Until they disperse, until the fluttering of wings ceases, and I fall. Hard, hard against the earth, the wet, almost fluid soil, as though the rain has been falling for days rather than hours, reducing the entire graveyard to mire.

Sliding on hands and knees down the slope, clawing at the muck, coming away with fistfuls of grass and weeds.

Familiar; the acid mainline of pure panic, a bolt of burning blue from crotch to forehead, igniting and scorching whatever it passes.

Something wrong...with my eyes; I can't see...

But I can; vague shapes, those of the gravestones, the surrounding trees, the silhouettes of nearby houses, the church. Windows burning, those of the houses white and cold, those of the church orange and warm.

Shivering, frozen, not with rain, but frost, glittering frost covering everything, colder than any winter dusk.

What the..?

Staggering, the ground no longer sludge, but hard and cruel beneath my feet, biting into naked soles. The world reeling around me, melting before my eyes, becoming a smeard image in a damaged cinema reel.

Sunshine, afternoon warmth, a sweet and still haze, ghosts of children dancing between the stones, mourners laying bunches of flowers and sewn dolls upon them. Watching, as they smile, as they weep; as they call their dancing, laughing kin to their arms.

A thought, a heartbeat, the world shimmering once more, ripples passing through it like a reflection in a still pond.

Suddenly surrounded, milling with those who gather, here in the church grounds. The stink of them; enough to make me gag, every breath flatulent, the sweat and filth of their bodies, their unwashed clothes...all eyes on the figure swaying in the soft sun, her filthy, battered body spasming, her eyes bulging from their sockets, alight with hatred, poisoned froth bubbling from her lips as she curses them all, curses every inch of land they walk and air they breathe...

Letting go, turning the page; a sensation like twisting a kaleidoscope, watching the world come apart before falling into pattern once more.

Choking, clutching at my throat, a colony of parasite ants suddenly swarming within. Burning grit in the air, in my eyes, seeing the church through them; a burned, shelled out ruin, yellow and scarlet haze, a sick sun; feverish, ash on the breeze, on every breath...

Closing my eyes, seeking that place; that stillness. The beach, amber sea, white, blinding sun. Mom and Dad...still in the chalet, as I carve a path through the white sand, toddling to the water's edge. As the crow settles on a nearby bit of driftwood, as it caws to me, seeming to say my name...

The sense of flailing, unfixedness, fading, grasping this moment with unseen fingers, in a vice of pure intent.

Opening my eyes.

A new world, a timeless world, that I don't know; past or future, some other present...not knowing or caring.

The church still standing, the trees betraying Autumn in their gold and scarlet gowns, the majority of them shed to reveal the black, gnarled bodies beneath. My friends the crows and magpies perched amongst them in cackling multitudes, watching, as though awaiting my next miracle.

Now as then, when they cackled and cawed their secrets to me, as they did to her, before the jealous and unsung choked the magic from her.

Laughing. Inside and out, at the thought of Doctor Weathers and her gnawed shapeless pens, her twitching leg, her flitting, uncertain eyes...

Not needed, not here, not now, not ever.

Wondering who or what or if she is, in this slice of time, this snared, stolen moment. What I might find out there, early for my own birth, late for my own death, beyond all anxiety or concern, where tomorrow or yesterday are barely a thought away.

Hornet hive dreams, venomous sleep. Sad stories at the bedside, runes glowing with blue witch light. Incredulous, a heretic regarding gospels, my burning companion a habitual liar; the witch that will never go to ash, that the pyre cannot consume. Her curses daily and exquisite; the breaking of Heaven, the rupturing of bliss; hallucinations of grey Hell whose solidity leaves us doubting all possibility of salvation. But welcome, welcome today, the night's promises sour, its raptures curdled, leaving me wary of angel's wisdom, the kindness of sleep.

The Lonely Friend

Weary smiles, empty hellos. Throb, throb, throb; ugly, migraine music. Waiting outside, in the cold; green-eyed, grey beard; little, smiling man, alone, alone, always. Except for the limping and sad one, yellow eyes, a chain that binds, so old, now, near the end of a road that will never be long enough.

The Fey Mound

Unseen by day, cloaked in mirages of haste and distraction. By dusk?; A crowned hillock, stained gold and red by the setting sun, a place where the world grows thin, where they clamour at the gates, whispering their sweetly cruel hymns to children and the dreaming alone, the shadows singing, dancing in welcome of the forgotten ones.

The Siren's Heaven

Stirring from her blue, blue bed as day dies; as the first stars shimmer like dew on her flushed flanks, her fluttering eyes. A song like police sirens, growling seduction, husky and slurred, promising narcotic bliss in her arms. The sky the ocean in which she sprawls, too vast to see, to embrace, though the ache consumes me, as I walk, as they stare; the coward blind and silent, who wonder but never speak, never ask, and so will never know her ecstasies.

The Enchanted Way

Brief, brief gold; angel's laughter, giving way to red lament. Liquid pools of amber on black and broken concrete, turning weeds to jewels, dust to motes of ground crystal. Fairies dance there, the smallest of their kind; heralding the hunt that will never come. This world...anathema to it, now; out of love with capricious beauty and unkind magic. The only whispers of it I will know, as I pass through the sunlight, as those dancing in it settle on my outstretched fingers. Dreams, and dreams only, dying with the light, as cold and concrete insist on themselves.

The Vagrant Wizard

Faceless and unknown, yet smiling like an old friend, seeing, eyes sore with visions and the smoke of his pipe. Fetish-infested dreadlocks, gold in his grin. Ragged coat flowing around a magpie frame. Avoiding his eyes, though he steps into my path, though his goblin companions giggle and snear. Laughing eyes and friendly greetings hiding spit that can sear, words that can flay. Aching for me to join his story, though he does not ask, allowing me to pass with little more than a smile, silently cursing myself for denying the magic that will never come again.

The Innocent's Fate

Destiny's cry, a dagger in the sun, shadow descending. Great wings stirring the breeze, making dust dance. Innocence hearing, disappearing into long grasses. Destiny waits, blinking its deep, dark eyes, talons biting into soft wood. Inhuman patience, engine obsession. A flicker, a heartbeat, all it requires; innocence barely having time to squeal before black talons sink into its flesh, before it rises, higher than it has ever climbed, into a Heaven it never prayed to, knowing in its wisdom, how empty it is.

The Guardian Beast

White, waiting in the sun. Home so close, but beyond. The Beast between, eyes only for me; not for the children, playing nearby, nor its keeper, who strains to hold it at bay, whimpering impotent commands. The creature growling as I pass, its glare a warning: This is not the way. You can never return home. Turning away, until it breaks its chain, until it churns up the rain-softened earth, the dew-jewelled grass, its keeper crying spells that it doesn't heed, that barely graze it, the prophecy it didn't speak and the promise of blood and bone too strong.

Author

George Lea is an entity that seems to simultaneously exist and not exist at various points and states in time and reality, mostly where there are vast quantities of cake to be had. He has a lot of books. And a cat named Rufus. What she makes of all this is anyone's guess.